California bus crash

By Claire Cain Miller The New York Times Jonah Engel Bromwich Sat., March 16, 2019 Nicole Eisenberg’s older son has wanted to be a star of the stage since he was a toddler, she said. He took voice, dance and drama lessons and attended the renowned Stagedoor Manor summer camp for half a dozen years, but she was anxious that might not be enough to get him into the best performing-arts programs. So Eisenberg and others in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, the affluent suburb where she lives, helped him start a charity with friends that raised more than $250,000 over four years. “The moms — the four or five moms that started it together — we started it, we helped, but we did not do it for them,” she recalled. “Did we ask for sponsors for them? Yes. Did we ask for money for them? Yes. But they had to do the work.” She even considered a donation to the college of his choice. “There’s no amount of money we could have … [Read more...] about The unstoppable love of the snowplow parent

SAN FRANCISCO (NYTIMES) - Ms Sheryl Sandberg was seething. Inside Facebook's Menlo Park, California, headquarters, top executives gathered in the glass-walled conference room of its founder, Mr Mark Zuckerberg. It was September 2017, more than a year after Facebook engineers discovered suspicious Russia-linked activity on its site, an early warning of the Kremlin campaign to disrupt the 2016 US election. Congressional and federal investigators were closing in on evidence that would implicate the company. But it wasn't the looming disaster at Facebook that angered Ms Sandberg. It was the social network's security chief, Mr Alex Stamos, who had informed company board members the day before that Facebook had yet to contain the Russian infestation. Mr Stamos' briefing had prompted a humiliating boardroom interrogation of Ms Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, and her billionaire boss. She appeared to regard the admission as a betrayal. "You threw us under the bus!" she yelled at … [Read more...] about ‘Slow, pause, determined’: How Facebook’s leaders delayed, denied and deflected to fight through a crisis

By Janet Reitman The New York Times Tues., Nov. 6, 2018 The first indication to Lt. Dan Stout that law enforcement’s handling of white supremacy was broken came in September 2017, as he was sitting in an emergency-operations centre in Gainesville, Fla., preparing for the onslaught of Hurricane Irma and watching what felt like his thousandth YouTube video of the recent violence in Charlottesville, Va. Jesus Christ, he thought, studying the footage in which crowds of angry men, who had gathered to attend or protest the Unite the Right rally, set upon one another with sticks and flagpole spears and flame throwers and God knows what else. A black man held an aerosol can, igniting the spray, and in retaliation, a white man picked up his gun, pointed it toward the black man and fired it at the ground. The Virginia state troopers, inexplicably, stood by and watched. Stout fixated on this image, wondering what kind of organizational failure had led to the debacle. He had … [Read more...] about How U.S. law enforcement failed to see the threat of white nationalism

VAXJO, Sweden: Ringed by forests in southern Sweden, the city of Vaxjo is thriving even as it cuts greenhouse gas emissions at rates more typical of economic crashes in recessions or wars.It is a radical example of tackling climate change by cutting the use of fossil fuels, offering a glimpse of how the world could stay within warming limits which U.N. scientists say are needed to avoid significant environmental damage.Vaxjo's power plant runs on biomass from timber. In winter, snow ploughs clear bicycle paths before roads to discourage cars, and political parties all back a target of making the city fossil-fuel free by 2030 to eliminate carbon dioxide emissions from oil, natural gas and coal.Around the world, governments are struggling to meet their various pledges to cut emissions under the 2015 Paris climate agreement, amid unease about heat waves, droughts, and wildfires that have raged this summer from Greece to California.Leading climate scientists are set to warn governments in … [Read more...] about Imitate Vaxjo? As heat rises, Swedish city goes green